This morning I was doing a mock inspection on my own house.
In the service panel, at the bottom, there is what appears to be numerous ground wires twisted together. I double checked with my voltage detector and confirmed these are not live wires.
The panel was rewired 6 years ago and passed city inspection at the time.
If they are Bonded, I am not sure. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
They were connected. Each set of three wires comes in from the bottom, the hot going to the breaker, neutral going to a bus, and the grounds appear to just be tied together.
You can see it’s a two part panel. The grounds for the breakers in the top portion to go a bus like one would expect.
It’s only the grounds for the breakers in the bottom 1/2 that are like this.
That is what I assumed by looking at it, but I’ve lived here for 6+ years with no issues, so I thought perhaps maybe there was some mad method I wasn’t aware of.
All my outlets are 3 prong. hit every outlet with a tester, every outlet in the house showed grounded, but I did find a few outlets in the garage that show open ground.
Which is annoying, as the electrician was originally hired (via a general contractor) to re-wire the garage before he took it upon himself to redo the entire panel. (The panel is on the back side of the garage).
Now I’m realizing the garage as a whole isn’t grounded properly due to this sloppy wiring. Which explains why i’ve had a few tools die on me here and there over the last few years.
I sort of had a bad feeling about the electrician at the time. But I didn’t know enough back them to realize just how incompetent he was.
Not to mention the incompetence of the city inspector who gave it a passing grade. lol.
Thank you everyone for your replies.
I’ll be hiring an electrician to get the grounds properly sorted out.